Did you ever watch cattle? I mean, really watch them, for a few hours? Mostly they just sit or stand around munching on grass, chewing their cud, or snoozing. But every once in a while a handful of them will stand up and point in one direction. And they may take a few steps in that direction. Then a few more will join them. And once a critical mass has been reached, the whole herd will just go. Domestic cattle, wild African cape buffalo, whatever. This is what they do.

And as the cattle do, so do Scienceblogs.com bloggers. And the current stampede about to form up is about fitness. I’m not sure where it started, but I first noticed it at ERV‘s blog, but Page 3.14 has also picked it up.

We’re not talking about Darwinian fitness, but rather, physical fitness.

So, because I’m as much a member of the herd as the next cow, I decided to join in and tell you my fitness story … or at least, a version of it. Part I is below the fold.Africa. Some time in the early 1990s.

I started out walking a good six feet behind her, to avoid the sand she was kicking up and the occasional thorn-lined branch that might swing behind anyone walking through the African Bush. We were traversing, extra-legally, an area people were not allowed because of the dangerous wild animals (mainly lion) and the chance of getting lost on this difficult to navigate terrain. We crossed the parallel linear dunes at a right angle …. up a grass covered dune, across it’s narrow top of red sand, down the next side, then across the bushy flat to the next dune. The reststation we were staying in, along with a dozen American travelers distributed among eight or nine grass-roofed chalets, was surrounded by a series of fences, the largest and outermost one being a 15 foot high affair designed to keep lions out and tourists in. Earlier in the day, I followed some of the camp workers to see where they got through the first fence, to the village they lived in. Then, using this intelligence, Lynne and I passed through that unlocked gate, and Lynne talked our way past a couple of security guards at other gates, then we found what was probably an informal smuggler’s opening in the 15 footer, and we were free.

Free in the Kalahari.

By now I was a full 20 or 30 feet behind Lynne, way more than necessary to avoid snapping branches. I decided to catch up a little just as we were about to mount the next dune, a bit larger than the last few. But Lynne took that moment to sprint rather than walk to the top, so while I also sprinted, I did not close the gap. In fact, she was down the other side of the dune before I attained the crest, and it took me a bit of work to get within 50 feet of her.

I hadn’t known Lynne very long, but we had been traveling together now for several days, and for reasons far beyond what I can explain here we had bonded rather quickly. Let’s just say diversity makes fast friends, and when there are only two of you in the lifeboat, you either sink or learn to trust each other. I was probably thinking about that, or about the strange holes we kept passing on the lower dune slopes that we later discovered to be silk spider traps, or the bright blue sky and the pleasant afternoon winter warmth when I noticed that Lynne had been out of my sight for a long time.

Finally, a few dunes later, I saw her at the bottom sitting in the shade of a Shepard’s tree. Eventually, I arrived at her rest spot, and we relaxed a bit and talked.

This is when I learned, while trying to catch my breath and not look too exhausted, that Lynne was considering herself to be rather out of shape. She told me that this trip was killing her. She needed to spend some time at the gym, she said, and this walk was telling her that she needed to do it soon. You see, Lynne was supposed to be in training for her first Ultra Marathon, a 250 kilometer race across the Green Kalahari. She had already run a couple of 50 km races that year as part of her prep, and she had also won a regional Ultimate Frisbee tournament and that was good, but with the race coming up soon she needed to be running every day and working with weights at least a few times a week. Neither was possible while we were guiding these tourists, staying mostly in game parks where we were not allowed to wander freely in the bush, and where there were no gyms.

So now I understood why Lynne was so keen on breaking out of the Kalahari restcamp, and I was glad we had done it. But I also realized, as I sat in the shade admiring my new friend’s stamina and resolve, that I had gone from a person who was always in pretty good shape to a person who was in the process of serious deterioration.

When I was a kid, I walked all the time. My parents were forever leaving me in various forests or on the side of lonely mountain roads, and I would always make my way home eventually, on foot. When I was a teenager, I had a girlfriend who lived far away, and a couple of five or six mile walks a day was a virtually daily thing for me (I did not grow up in a car culture). At that time, I would also spend a couple of weeks a year in the Adirondack mountains. I would cover between 90 and 150 miles, much of it over peaks reaching beyond 5,000 feet, often trail-less. Later, as an archaeologist, I walked and walked and walked, but often carrying piles of equipment and digging dozens and dozens of holes per day, on survey. Eventually, I went off to the Congo for fieldwork. I was famous among the pygmies for my walking there. I would routinely walk 10 miles through the forest one way with an empty pack, then 10 miles the other way with 110 pounds of food, or along the “road” either 10 or 20 miles, depending, to and from market.

I was always the one who was not tired, no matter how far we went or how much I carried.

Then it came time to write my thesis and do some other stuff, so I spent a few years mostly at a desk job and slowly slowly, month after month, my legendary walking muscles turned into something other than muscle, and though I had no more visible body fat than I had ever had I’m sure my muscle had all gone south.

And I knew this because as I sat under the Shepard’s tree, I realized that for the first time in my life, ever, I had been out-walked by another human being. Never mind that she was a semi-professional athlete marathon runner training for an ultra (which, by the way, she would indeed run, and in fact win, several times over the coming years).

So I resolved.

I resolved that on my return to the states, I would get my self in shape. And I did. I got myself very much in shape, and the next time I returned to South Africa, Lynne did not out walk me. And the next time after that, people at the gyms across South Africa found themselves in awe of my physical prowess as I traveled from place to place being … really really fit.

How did I do it? Well, I found Lenora, Inflicter of Pain. And I let her have her way with me. I’ll tell you about Lenora in the next installment.

Comments

You expect us to believe this? One only has to look at your picture and conclude that one can out-bench press you. Then, obviously, since all fitness is related to the g factor for athleticism, we can obviously conclude we can also out walk you.

Training without access to showering facilities is (I think) a lot better for developing endurance because more nitric oxide from commensal ammonia oxidizing skin bacteria facilitates mitochondria biogenesis. I suspect that this is some of the reason for the Kenyan and Ethiopian dominance of western marathons. Training in their native land without access to showering is equivalent to training at high altitude (because the high NO blocks cytochrome c oxidase), when they go to the West to compete, and shower off all that biofilm, their basal NO level goes down, and it is like they are running in a higher O2 partial pressure.

The increased endurance happens after the exercise when the body repairs itself (plus some extra), not during the exercise. It is the strength of the repair response (which depends on NO and a lot of other stuff), not the amount of pain or how severely one exercises.

Lyn, it isn’t so much gain in muscle that NO is important in (it is important but not super important), it is more in attainment of endurance and peak O2 consumption. For those you need lots of mitochondria in muscles that are well vascularized. Mitochondria biogenesis and the right kind of vascular remodeling require high NO. When NO does those things and when high NO is required is during sleep following the exercise.